What's new in Citrix Hypervisor

Citrix Hypervisor extends its leadership as the most mature hypervisor for virtual graphics capabilities, the most integrated hypervisor with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, and revolutionary security capabilities only available with Citrix.

Most Mature Graphics Capabilities

As pioneers of the virtual graphics space, XenServer 7 extends our leadership with the industry-first capability of vGPU XenMotion and as the only hypervisor to support GPUs from all three major vendors.

Citrix Hypervisor enables choice, with support for all 3 major GPU vendors, empowering you to choose the best GPU vendor to fit your business’s needs. Only XenServer supports AMD MxGPU, Intel GVT-g, and NVIDIA virtual GPU.

XenServer 7.6 enhances the scalability of your virtual infrastructure with thin provisioning with block storage. Thin provisioning allocates storage space as needed. This means the virtual disk starts out small and consumes more space only as more data is written to the virtual disk. For Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments that leverage Machine Creation Services (MCS), this could amount to huge reductions in storage space and enable massive cost savings.

Now you can easily schedule hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly snapshots on a group of VMs. However, it doesn’t just take the snapshots, it aids in the management of your snapshot lifecycles. By allowing you to set the maximum number of snapshots to keep, Citrix Hypervisor deletes the oldest snapshot in a rolling fashion.

Live patching is an industry-first hypervisor capability brought to you with XenServer 7.1. It greatly reduces operational overhead by enabling IT admins to hot-patch (update) their active Citrix Hypervisors without rebooting. This capability is not found on any other commercial hypervisor and has been used in production by a large cloud computing provider for months.

Simplify patching at scale with new automated updates. Citrix Hypervisor now supports the automated application of fixes to multiple hosts. This new automated update technology batch patches multiple hosts by automatically downloading necessary fixes from Citrix, installing these patches in the correct order, and rebooting the hosts in sequence while redistributing VMs to prevent outages.

Citrix Hypervisor Conversion Manager now offers the ability to migrate Linux VMs from other hypervisors to Citrix Hypervisor. This offers greater migration flexibility for customers wanting to migrate off of VMware solutions. Customers wanting to deliver secure Linux virtual desktops and applications from Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops can avoid the vTax by taking advantage of Citrix Hypervisor.

XenServer 7.5 quadruples the maximum pool size to 64 hosts. The benefits of deploying larger pools include fewer pools to manage, more flexible in-pool migration with shared storage, and more flexibility with High Availability, as well as fewer Machine Catalogs needed for large Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments. This saves you time and administrative effort during your image update process and ongoing maintenance.

With patent-pending technology from Citrix Hypervisor, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is the only VDI platform to enable the Windows Continuum experience with Windows 10 virtual desktops. Now, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops enables Windows 10 virtual desktops to automatically toggle between tablet and desktop mode, in real-time, as the state of the hardware change, to provide the most native Windows 10 experience.

Introducing new Provisioning Services (PVS) Accelerator technology that results in up to 25% faster desktop boot up times, up to 98% lower network bandwidth usage, and up to 93% reduced PVS CPU usage - only available with Citrix Hypervisor. Check out the video below for a quick demo of PVS Accelerator:

This Citrix Hypervisor LTSR enables up to 10 years of support (5 years mainstream and 5 years of extended support) making it the only hypervisor to have product lifecycle dates fully aligned with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, which can radically simplify infrastructure maintenance for customers choosing to deploy a full Citrix solution.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops customers are now entitled to all of the features of Citrix Hypervisor Enterprise edition, regardless of their Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops license type. Additionally, all editions of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are now entitled to features like Machine Creation Services (MCS) Accelerator technology, previously a platinum-only feature.

Positioning Citrix Hypervisor for broader Nutanix integration that will ultimately lead to providing Nutanix with access to unique Citrix Hypervisor features, such as provisioning services, high performance virtualized GPU, enhanced security and more. Citrix Hypervisor is the most tightly integrated hypervisor with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, you can now chose Nutanix HCI with Citrix Hypervisor for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops while leveraging these unique integration benefits while saving money.

Hypervisor security revolutionized

Citrix Hypervisor, in partnership with Bitdefender, is the only hypervisor to enable the revolutionary security solution, Hypervisor Introspection - safeguarding against targeted and advanced attacks. XenServer 7.3 extends the platform’s security portfolio with support for Bromium Secure Platform – an application isolation security solution with Micro-VM technology to protect against malware and zero-day attacks.

While there are hundreds of millions of different types of malware released every year, hackers only have a limited set of techniques available to remotely gain a foothold of victims’ system. Hypervisor Introspection can detect and prevent these attacks techniques in real-time – a capability not available with any other security solution, delivering unparalleled protection to your virtual infrastructure. HVI prevented WannaCry, day-zero, without any updates needed, by blocking EternalBlue, the underlying exploitation tool used to spread WannaCry.

XenServer 7.3 extends the security of your Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Windows 10 infrastructure with hardware-based isolation of users’ application and tasks, to protect against malware and zero-day attacks with Bromium Secure Platform. Bromium is the first vendor to use virtualization-based security with micro-VM technology to completely isolate the application or task to ensure any malicious behavior within the micro-VM cannot impact the host or VDI environment.